


The Amnesiac's Bible

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Amnesia, Anxiety, Caffeine Dependency, Canonical Character Death, Car Accidents, Character Study, Characters Refusing to Communicate Like Mature Adults, Characters Who Are Laconic and Unyielding, Cognitive Dissonance, Contemplation of Suicide, Controlled Apathy, Depression, Disassociation, Flashback-Heavy, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Human Brains Being Unable to Comprehend the Absurd, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Introspection, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Men Who Are Broken Inside, Mystery, Panic Attacks, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Posthumous Characters, Reflections On All That Has Been Lost, Seizures, Self-Blame, Self-Indulgent Purple Prose, Self-Loathing, Slow Burn, The Desolation of a Post-Jay World, This Is Partly A Tim W. Fic After All, social disconnect, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-14 07:25:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2183037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jessica is left with three things: a medication prescription, a warning not to look for answers, and a freshly, disconcertingly blank memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Retrograde

_“Where are we going?” Jessica fumbles with keys, jamming them into the car door, and her heart is roaring in her throat. “What do we do now?”_

_“Uh.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, his voice is a smear of ragged fear and weariness, the dark crescent moons hang printed beneath his eyes. “Go to your place. Pack something, pack lightly.”_

_The words spill out in a frantic jabber, and it doesn’t help that at every other word his vision breaks to scan the hostile, distant treeline, the infection of paranoia naked in each twitching movement._

_“We need to go somewhere that he’s not going to think to look for us,” he continues, and it’s horribly, starkly obvious that Jessica is just hearing an untidy, panicked thought process vocalized. “And we’ll figure out what to do from there. Okay?”_

Day fifty-three of working at one of the local thrift stores, day one-hundred-and-twenty-four of taking tiny white capsules daily, day one-hundred-and-thirty since her mind woke up distressingly blank, and the routine still feels off. 

Jessica works until she feels like shit, then sleeps until she wakes up feeling like shit, plagued by dreams of things she cannot remember and should not care to remember.

Delete all foreign numbers, keep your head down.

Jessica has strict standing orders to mind her own business and not involve herself in anything that could be in any way related memory mindgames. Certain words leap out to her still, certain taboo terms like _cameras_ and _hotels_ and _tapes_ and perhaps there _is_ a reason she takes the long route, around and away from the ratty motel between Second and Ninth. She has long since concluded, however, that this reason must be buried so far into her subconscious that it’s beyond retrieving.

The dreams are the sporadic moments of clarity, potential indications of what could have happened in those months? days? years? of missing time still on file.

She hates them. 

And she hates the little white capsules with their applications of synthetic immunity, the daily reminders that at some indistinct point in her life, her mind went wrong and she has no idea when or why or how. The doctors are pretty much _no_ help in that department either, because for all the recommendations and prescriptions it’s pretty obvious that they’re just guessing at this point. And they never use the words _selective amnesia_ but, _really_ , what else could it _be?_

And then there’s the number in her phone she inevitably scrolls back to, the sole unrecognized number she didn’t delete because she could actually ascribe a name to it. She considers calling it, probably at least twice a week, if only to leave a long angry message demanding some _answers_ , but she always, _always_ errs on the side of caution and leaves it be. She was left with those ambiguous, succinct instructions:

_“Don’t look into it. Don’t look for answers. And don’t call me.”_

So she doesn’t.

Jessica is determined to live her life in a perfectly average, responsible manner, because even an indistinct amount of time left empty in her recent memory is too much for her. And she can dream up terrifying scenarios for what happened in that missing time all she wants - she has been reliably informed that whatever it is she can imagine, the real thing is _worse._

(Jessica cannot be altogether sure if her sole, laconic source can be considered truly _reliable_ , especially since she only can assign the single name of “Tim” to him in her phone contacts, but she decided that she owed it to him to trust him since he was the one that got her the prescription in the first place, and those are the only things that have helped with the headaches and dreams so far.)

And she’s refrained from calling her source. She’s resisted the urge to dial up the number when it’s three in the morning and uncomfortable flashes of half-remembered fragments have kept her up all night, if only for the satisfaction of working out that internalized frustration in the form of screaming for answers.

Jessica reminds herself daily: _she does not want answers._

_She does not want to know what happened._

_She wants her Normal, Average Life._

And she has it.

Sort of.

Day fifty-four of the tiresome, boring, _average_ job, and Jessica’s boss has phoned in at _six in the morning_ to let her know that her flaky co-worker can’t come in today, so would Jessica mind terribly covering his shift until he can make it?

Jessica _does_ mind and doesn’t say so. She’d be happy to. She’d be happy for an excuse to avoid the dragging, often horrifying process of sleep-dream-memory- _stop_ , even if it means downing two cups of coffee in record time so she can be cognizant enough to drive herself to work.

(Jessica has in no way developed a caffeine dependency.)

Day fifty-four of the job, the job that Tim helpfully recommended her before disappearing forever and ever with only the vague warning not to call, not to write, and not to go looking for answers, and Jessica is running late for a shift that isn’t even hers so she has to take a more direct route so she has to pass the motel between Second and Ninth and is that her imagination or have her hands started shaking?

They haven’t started shaking.

They haven’t. They _haven’t._

Jessica is fine. Jessica is average. Jessica is Normal. Jessica is -

_\- everything is fine -_

Her jaw aches with the pressure of gritted teeth, her eyes snap shut with the surging pounding in her temples, and there’s the earsplitting screech of tires on asphalt -

\- those tires aren’t hers -

\- someone _screams -_

Jessica pulls over, barely avoiding a head-on collision, and her heart is hammering out Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits and the incoming vehicle tears along the edge of the driver’s car door instead of smashing directly into the windshield and her engine sputters with a loud, cracking _bang_ that sounds disturbingly like a gunshot.

Jessica’s shoulders curl protectively around her, both hands glued to the wheel, and she cannot stop _shivering._

 _“God,”_ she wrenches out between clenched teeth, unable to contain the tremor in her voice. “Oh my - _god.”_

Traffic around them has slowed, people rubbernecking to observe the slightly smoking hoods of both vehicles. There is no screaming, no blood, and no sirens so Jessica assumes the damage is minimal.

Exterior damage, at least.

The furious slam of another car door - the other driver, her guess - only serves to make her jump. Jessica still sits rigid, eyes shut, trying not to show how hard she is breathing.

She has to get out of the car.

She has to get out of the car and right now she would really rather just stay huddled inside it, thanks.

(She has the fleeting feeling that some earlier version of her - Jessica one-point-oh, pre-Neurological Event Jessica, would have cared over-extensively, would have given a damn. There must have been an overpowering compassion there once. As it is, the most she can muster is a wary, learned apathy.)

(No doubt a self-enforced behavior, a result of Tim’s parting words.)

_“Where are we going?” Jessica fumbles with keys, jamming them into the car door, and her heart is roaring in her throat. “What do we do now?”_

And Jessica gets out of the car.

And she approaches the other driver, doing her best to settle a mask of careful concern over her features as she asks if he’s okay, is everything all right, sir? He is red in the face and shouting and Jessica is scrambling to think of what comes next - she should call the insurance company, or the police, and she should not apologize or take responsibility. These are behaviors conditioned into her, automatic responses from years of driving, from months obtaining her license, from a life she can no longer remember in full.

(Jessica finds it a terrible injustice that her muscles can recall what her brain cannot.)

(She also finds it disturbing that weirdly consistent habits have lurked in subconscious, secluded pockets in her brain while she still has trouble remembering who she was and what _happened_ to her.) 

And then she has to call her boss and let her know that she can’t come in this morning after all - there’s been a horrible accident and she will have to sort this out first.

And then she will -

_“Uh.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, his voice is a smear of ragged fear and weariness, the dark crescent moons hang printed beneath his eyes. “Go to your place. Pack something, pack lightly.”_

And then she will exchange information with the other driver so they can work out the details over who hit whom (because she was certainly not responsible) and who will have to pay for the damage (it will not be Jessica with her fifty-four days of a job that pays barely above the minimum wage, who’s only received one paycheck since she started).

And then she will -

_The words spill out in a frantic jabber, and it doesn’t help that at every other word his vision breaks to scan the hostile, distant treeline, the infection of paranoia naked in each twitching movement._

And then she will take photos of the damage on her phone that can take pictures but cannot record video because -

_“We need to go somewhere that he’s not going to think to look for us,” he continues, and it’s horribly, starkly obvious that Jessica is just hearing an untidy, panicked thought process vocalized. “And we’ll figure out what to do from there. Okay?”_

Because they will need to forward evidence to assess the damage, right, and that will make it easier -

_“You got everything you need?” He gets out of the car and she can see that the wild, unchecked panic in his eyes has dulled a little._

That will make it easier to -

_“So I need a four digit combination that both of us can remember,” he says tiredly, knuckles white with their grip on his camera. “Just in case you need to get in for any reason.”_

That will make it easier to decide who is culpable for the damage and who gets to - 

_“Well, how about the last four digits of my phone number? That’s easy to remember.”_

And who gets to -

She doesn’t remember her old phone number. She doesn’t remember _any_ of her old phone numbers.

And then she will call her _doctor_ , because this headache is probably unrelated but the wheedling pain drilling into the center of her skull cannot possibly be _normal._

She has a _system._

Jessica fumbles for the bottle of medication in the glove compartment and dry-swallows two of the pills and she will be _fine_ she has been fine before she will be fine now she will be _fine_ she is _fine_ everything is _fine -_

And then she will call her doctor.

And then everything will be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It should be noted that this chapter comes with trigger warnings for car accidents and anxiety/panic attacks.


	2. Lacunar

_“You got everything you need?” He gets out of the car and she is relieved to see that the wild, unchecked panic in his eyes has dulled a little._

_“Yeah,” she says, nodding shakily. Her heart hasn’t stopped pounding the whole drive to home and back, and her hands still feel unsteady._

_“Uh,” he stammers, grasping for a plan, for a course of action, for anything. “I think we should just stay in our hotel rooms for the rest of the day.” One of his hands flaps nervously in the direction of the hotel. “And then we’ll figure out where we’re going tomorrow.”_

_She nods, becoming dreadfully, painfully aware that she’s just inadvertently gotten herself involved in something that will, in all likelihood, send her carefully structured life into unmitigated chaos._

Aside from the long, unsightly scratch on the left driver’s door, Jessica’s car is otherwise undamaged and the other driver reported likewise. It’s very probable that she could have still made it to work only a few hours late, but a call to her boss (and a slight exaggeration of the damage) has allowed her a day off to recover.

So now she lies on the couch in the small yet serviceable apartment with the rent she’s fallen behind on, massaging her aching temples with one hand while she scrolls through her phone contacts with the other. Her doctor has not been notified. Her insurance company has received one call and she has since not gotten back to them.

(She keeps saying, she keeps saying she’s stitched a life together but her own unconscious patterns of behavior are breaking it apart by the threads.)

Instead she squints at the three-letter name hovering in the middle of her very short contacts list, wondering if she should -

No.

_“Don’t look into it. Don’t look for answers. And don’t call me.”_

It might have been helpful if he’d told her _why._

Maybe she doesn’t _want_ to remember and maybe she is eager to forget the things she can’t remember so that she can start over and maybe it’s entirely possible that she could do exactly that, but the fact remains that those _memories_ that she can’t remember and those _words_ she doesn’t have a context for aren’t going away. They’ve stuck to the sides and corners and shadowed hallways in her brain and no amount of concentrating or head-pounding will make them any clearer. They’re grounded in some in-between state - both fleetingly, occasionally present and infuriatingly out of reach to retrieve fully.

Jessica doesn’t want answers. She might, however, want an _explanation._

No answers.

She doesn’t want answers.

She closes her eyes and repeats it to herself. _She doesn’t want answers._

And then she hits the “Call” button and listens to the phone as it dials.

She doesn’t need to wait long.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end is too tinny and full of static to be altogether recognizable, though Jessica can certainly relate to the tired edge to the word.

“Tim?” she breathes.

There is a long, tense period of silence.

“What?” he finally snaps in response, and she can practically _feel_ the sharpening wariness building thick around him. She can count the number of times she’s met him in person on one hand, yet that is the one thing that has remained distressingly, steadfastly constant: the intense paranoia radiating from him like a virus.

Jessica does not know what to say.

“There a reason you’re calling?” he asks testily.

“I think I’m remembering something.” The words jumble out before Jessica can properly assess their damage and she is rewarded by the answering _click_ of someone hanging up on the other side.

Immediately, she dials again. 

It takes her three tries to get a response.

“What the _fuck?”_

The unexpectedly abrupt, violent answer nearly causes Jessica to drop the phone.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she just repeats the ghosting, pale recollections flickering in her head:

“There’s a guy with a car and a camera and I ask him where we’re going and he tells me to pack a bag,” she stumbles over her words in the effort to get them out before he hangs up again. “There’s a bag of tapes and a hotel room and maybe a man in a tan jacket, I don’t know, but there’s something about a, a safe and a phone number and someone named - named - ”

Tim says nothing. 

Jessica’s eyes shut, her hand reaches up to knead at her forehead because she remembers, she _remembers,_ she _must -_

“Who’s Jay?”

Tim hangs up.

Jessica re-dials.

Five times.

“Stop,” Tim answers on the sixth try, and even over the poor reception, the subtle tremor in his voice is dark and audible. “Please, stop. I told you not to go looking.”

“I’m not looking,” Jessica says. Her hand has drifted down to pinch at the bridge of her nose, her eyes still screwed tightly shut and she’s seriously considering hunting down some aspirin to ward off the worsening headache. “I swear I’m not. Things just keep _coming_ to me, is all.”

“Well stop it.”

“Great.” The hand drops and Jessica wishes she could convey the biting, brutally withering look she gives the opposite wall over a phone call because the vaguely sardonic tilt her tone has taken is just not doing it justice. “Thanks. I’ll be sure to ask my doctor about it. You know, since he’s been so _helpful.”_

The last word curls into a faint snarl. 

Okay.

So Jessica is _tired._

She is _tired_ of being kept in the dark (some might say deliberately) by her shadowy, elusive, and frankly downright _flaky_ link to the former version of Jessica she was prior to the whole _selective amnesia_ thing.

Tim is silent.

She hears the faint increased burst of static that indicates a heavy sigh.

“I _told_ you,” he grinds out, and the words are hard, as if he is speaking through clenched teeth, _“not_ to call me.”

“I can’t _do_ that.” And the hand is up again, tangling into her dark sweep of hair and her voice is tearing and _god_ she wishes she could convey how much genuine _distress_ has been pitched into her life just now. “I _tried_ that. I _tried_. And today I drove to work and you know what happened? I nearly _crashed._ Because you told me I won’t remember anything, you _told_ me, _you told me,_ but there’s stuff left _over_ and - ”

And her throat constricts and she is not swallowing down a sob, she is not, she is _not._

“And I’m _trying_. But you cannot just dump all that on me and then just _leave,_ you get that?” 

And Tim is silent. 

And Tim is silent.

And Tim inhales, quietly, sharply.

And Tim is silent.

And Jessica is trying _very hard_ not to pull her hair out, she is gripping her tiny kitchen counter so tightly her fingertips _hurt,_ and she is struggling, struggling, struggling to keep back the waves of panic and terror and sick, trembling _despair_ over the situation she has found herself in and _does not want to be in,_ this is not her _choice_ this is not her _fault_ she is _trying_ she is _trying_ she has _been trying._

She is _tired._

“Help,” she says simply, finally, distinctly, with none of her previous distress or voice-breaking or any of it.

“I _can’t,”_ Tim hisses, vocal chords apparently restored, and either the reception is _really_ bad or he’s starting to crack around the edges too.

(The “started” part is debatable at this point, because what little Jessica has glimpsed of Tim’s psyche is a fair indication that, to go along with the “cracked” metaphor, he’s pretty well shattered and ground to dust at this point.)

“The pills, the ones you recommended?” Jessica decides to shoot for a new angle. “They don’t - they don’t work. Not fully.”

“What?” Tim’s voice sharpens. 

“I mean, they _work,”_ she says hastily, sensing the build of dismay behind the single word. “Kind of. With the headaches and the coughing fits and, and everything. But not, well. _Everything._ The, uh, the.”

“The _what?”_

Definitely panic.

“I don’t know what to _call_ them.” She picks her next words delicately. “F-flashbacks? Memory relapses?”

There is a loaded silence.

“I’m _remembering_ things.”

“What things?”

“I _told_ you.” Tim had evidently stopped listening very early on in her tirade. “They’re, they’re just little moments. Flashes.” She squints, stares at the wavering, color-of-vomit ceiling in the effort to remember. “A guy. A camera. A hotel room. A...I think it’s a gun?”

“What else?” Tim’s voice is both rigid and shaking, which just about describes what Jessica is feeling right now.

“Um.” She shuts her eyes now. She cannot forget. She _cannot_ forget. “S-some numbers. One-one-zero-two. And a symbol. A circle. With a…sort of an X through it?” 

She opens her eyes.

And waits.

And waits.

She thinks she hears Tim breathe _“shit”,_ vicious and nearly inaudible, on the other end. 

Then:

“Jessica?” 

“Yeah.”

“Look, just. Please. I told you not to look for answers. So just - ”

“I’m not _looking for answers!”_ Jessica’s splintering, tenuous calm _detonates_. “They’re _finding_ me _on their own!”_

“So _ignore_ them.”

_She calls for help. She calls for help from a thing. A long, rake-skinny thing._

“Easy for _you_ to say!” She is fuming. She is _fuming._ She doesn’t think she’s ever been the sort of person to _fume_ but apparently a handful of missing years-months-days-whatever will do a really cruel number on _anyone’s_ base personality, reactions to the suggested, inane coping tactic of “maybe if you ignore the problem it will go away” included. “I’m not _trying_ to remember! It’s just - _happening.”_

“Yeah, well I _do_ \- ” Tim clips the sentence oddly, muffling the rest in a bizarre partial cough. 

“What? Remember?”

The weight of the wordlessness that follows answers her question for her.

_She doesn’t find the emaciated, heart-stop-terrifying appearance of the thing odd at first because she hasn’t noticed, because she is scared, she is running, she is desperate._

Jessica cannot breathe.

She cannot _breathe._

She cannot breathe because Tim _remembers._

 _This_ is why he warned her.

The overwhelming clarity of all of it slams into her in a vast, undiluted wave. Tim must have touched into - something. Something _awful,_ if the brief blinks and snippets her damaged mind is recalling are any indication. He touched into something and at some point she must have gotten involved and as much as he made the effort to isolate them both from the aftermath, the repercussions are still echoing into _both_ their lives. Tim must have gotten the worst of it, if he remembers.

Especially if he remembers _all_ of it.

 _The overwhelming_ wrongness _of what she is seeing strikes her, and her body freezes._

There must be a reason, after all, that each flicker of that untapped past is accompanied by the unmistakable pull of cold, slow-burning dread.

“Tim, do you remember?”

“Look, I - ” He breaks off again, but the words sound pained. “I can’t - this is - I can’t do this right now.”

“Then _when?”_ She has _had_ it with waiting on Tim to not call and not tell her anything and generally not get back to her. “Because I’m tired of the dreams and the flashes and the near car crashes and _all of it._ Just. Please.” She softens the last two words as best as she can through her fervent, blazing frustration. “Tim, _please.”_

“We can - we’ll meet.” Tim sounds like this is the last thing he wants to do, but Jessica doesn’t put much thought toward Tim’s personal agenda at the moment, seeing as he’s been operating with little to no regard for hers. “Just, uh. Don’t say anything about this to anyone, all right? We have to keep this between us.”

Jessica does her best to suppress an utterly humorless laugh. Yeah. Sure. Tell the world she’s flashing back to horrifying episodes of time spent in hotels she can no longer remember. That’s _exactly_ what she would do.

 _Its arms stretch longer than imagination, its body curves in a subtle, horrifying arc, its face is an awful blank oval that somehow still manages to radiate a curiousness, an intense maliciousness, and she does not want to go near it no she does not want to go she does not no no no she does not she does not she does not no no no NO NO NO_

“Fine. Where and when?” 

“I’ll text you.”

Jessica’s throat tightens. Tim has hardly been the epitome of reliability since...well, _ever,_ and given his current reluctance to tell her _anything,_ she’s not sure she likes the idea of having to wait on him.

Again.

“Look, I - I get that my track record with this sort of thing hasn’t exactly been perfect, all right?” Tim thankfully seems to know exactly where her mind went following his promise. “I know that better than anyone.”

“So tell me _now,”_ Jessica says, merciless, because apparently compassion has only gotten her as far as a memory wipe and a brand new life with poorly defined parameters in the form of little white pills. “An address, a date, _anything._ Where and when.”

Tim sighs. 

Jessica waits.

The headache is getting worse and she has forgotten to look for aspirin.

“Fine.”

He concedes and gives her an address. An apartment. His, probably. It should take a few hours of driving to reach it, but doable, definitely. Provided she takes tomorrow off. 

She can do that.

 _\- its tendrils are long and stretched and she cannot glean the dreadful incomprehension of its existence and it reaches for her fragile human mind and_ twists -

And she will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with a warning for triggered flashbacks and panic/anxiety.


	3. Repressed

_She does her very best not to tear off in the opposite direction, determined to keep her shaking, uneven steps moving at a reasonable pace, not caring where they take her as long as that place is Not Here._

_“No,” he says, firmly but not unkindly. “This way.”_

_She follows the direction he’s indicating with her eyes but makes no movements toward it. The only thing she can take relief from is the fact that it is far too dark for him to see how terrified she must look._

_“Deeper into the woods?” The ridge of fractured dismay tinges her words just a little too strongly; the question is spoken too rapidly, her voice nearly squeaking as it shoots up one or two octaves._

_“I know a shortcut.” The friendliness in his initial words is belied by the brusqueness of them now. As he turns away, even in the dark she can glimpse the hard line of tension in his shoulders. “Come on.”_

_The camera seems important, so she grabs at it. She has little choice other than to swallow her misgivings and follow._

Tim’s apartment building is somehow even smaller and lonelier than Jessica’s, something which she considers to be quite the accomplishment. She sits in her car in the equally tiny parking lot and waits for some sign that Tim will fulfill his promise.

(She knows and remembers that he did not exactly promise to explain _anything_ concretely, but Jessica is here now and she has already resolved not leave until he does _something.)_

So she sits and waits and watches the apartment building, the weight of too many sleepless nights now prickling darkly behind her eyes.

Tim exits his apartment in a slouch of slow-moving, dispassionate exhaustion. She gets out of the car and catches his line of sight as he descends one of the exterior staircases, overtly and deliberately obvious so he has no excuse for avoidance.

(She doesn’t entirely know where this instinct came from, but it strikes her that Tim would be the sort of person to favor tactics of avoidance.)

“Hi,” she says after he pauses for a moment, jaw locked and eyes hardening a little. She does her best to keep the accusatory note from her voice, but she doesn’t think she succeeds.

Tim nods by way of greeting, a careful, wary dip of the head.

(She can’t help but relate to the expression his gaunt face wears - trapped, anxious, withdrawn.)

The camera -

_The camera seems important, so she grabs at it._

“I came as soon as I could,” she says unnecessarily after a lengthy time, resisting the urge to press a hand against the side of her head and apply pressure to stop the flow of thoughts that she doesn’t think belong to her. 

“Yeah,” says Tim.

One hand rubs self-consciously at his arm. His eyes drop to the floor for a minute before his posture re-asserts itself. He straightens and shakes an untidy sweep of bangs from his face.

“What’s up?”

The casual innocuity of the phrase sounds utterly forced. They can both tell. 

Neither of them comment on it.

“I, uh.” Jessica doesn’t know where to begin. Somehow, she doesn’t think she should initiate the conversation with _what the hell am I supposed to do with the memories of an inhuman faceless terror that apparently stalked me and several people I must have known at some point?_

That’s just common sense.

She shuffles her feet.

“Look, this is…”

_Weird. Uncalled for. Weird. Ridiculous. Weird._

_Weird._

Tim nods again, much more emphatically this time, and his gaze switches back to the floor to study the intricate patterns buried in the cracked asphalt of the apartment complex parking lot.

Jessica doesn’t know what else to say so her eyes drop to examine the pavement as well, partially just to buy herself time and partially to see what all the fuss is about.

“I told you not to go looking for answers.”

Her head jerks up to see that Tim has leveled his worn, suspicious eyes on her. A tiny frown has notched into the curvature of his brow and his head tilts on a partially skewed axis. Curious. Quizzical.

_Its face is an awful blank oval that somehow still manages to radiate a curiousness, an intense maliciousness. Its head tilts to one side with inhuman, oil-slick slowness. She can see the faintly puckered pinches on the otherwise empty, smooth surface and she thinks she screams._

Jessica shuts her eyes tightly and does her best to blot out the memory that shouldn’t be there.

“I didn’t,” she hisses out through gritted teeth. “I don’t _want_ answers. I just need this - gone.”

She gestures loosely at her head, which has already begun to throb again. Faintly. 

When she opens her eyes again, Tim looks no less puzzled.

“Sorry?”

“I don’t - ” She makes an aborted gesture with one hand before stopping, frustrated, wholly at a loss over how to explain the recurring sputters of memory in the corners of her brain. “I told you, I _remember.”_

The cloud of paranoia that has thus far hovered just behind Tim’s otherwise impassive features abruptly tightens into something much more direct.

He says nothing.

“I just get little - little _flashes,_ you know?” At some point, Jessica must have started pacing. The knot of anxiety in her gut hasn’t loosened, nor has the furious wringing of her hands done anything to alleviate it. “Moments, images, words that don’t make sense. I just - ” She brings one hand up to dig its heel viciously at one eye socket. “I don’t want it. I don’t _want_ to remember.”

Tim looks at her, long and thoughtful and the slightest bit pained. 

“I’m sorry,” he says carefully, and it sounds like he’s choosing his words with caution. “The only thing I can think of would be my...would be the medication.”

Jessica’s hand creeps into her jacket pocket to curl an instinctive fist around the bottle of white pills.

“They’re helping me remember?”

“They - they might. I don’t know.” Tim scrubs the back of his hand over his eyes. The exhaustion so prevalent in his posture has begun to smudge into his words.

He’s lying through his teeth. He has no idea.

“And I can’t stop taking them,” she reasons slowly. “Because things would get worse.”

“Much worse,” he replies grimly. She’s close enough to see the faintly bloodshot rings rimming his irises and the deep, peaked lines of fatigue that weigh on either side of his nose. 

“And you can’t tell me _how.”_

It’s not a question. Tim doesn’t like questions. He told her not to ask questions and not to look for answers.

Jessica doesn’t know if she trusts Tim.

She does, however, trust the undercurrent of pitted fear that arrests his voice whenever he warns her.

_She has had a long day and comes home to an unusually empty house. Her phone has two unplayed messages and she listens with half an ear._

_“- wanted to call and let you know I got in touch with Amy, so just...disregard my last m - "_

Emotion and memory are two separate things, unreliable for two distinct, disparate reasons, but even mnemonic failings cannot account for the instinctual, knee-jerk emotional response attached to a particular phrase or meaning. 

“It’s - ” Tim breaks off and his not-even-remotely clear gaze becomes yet more muddied. “Well. Complicated.”

Jessica has no idea what he means by that and doesn’t know how to address any of this without accessing an arsenal of _whys_ and _hows_ and question-like words that Tim seems to have an all-encompassing, fierce aversion to.

She misses the sensation of not remembering. Before the flashes started there had only been reassuring blankness, and now -

_Its face is an awful blank oval -_

Now that sensation isn’t reassuring anymore.

“You told me,” she begins again. “About your friend, the one who moved.”

Tim has tensed again. He’s waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop and the anticipation _paralyzes_ him.

“I don’t think he moved to anywhere.”

Tim makes no indication to confirm or deny her assumption. He simply stands, one hand buried in a pocket, and yanks out a crumpled box of cigarettes and a lighter.

“I think he’s probably dead.”

Tim lights one of the cigarettes and inhales deeply.

“Or worse.”

Jessica doesn’t know what could possibly fall under the latter category of _“worse,”_ especially when the former category is _“dead,”_ but the raw, ephemeral skids of terror she’s experienced along each shade of memory suggests that _“worse”_ is definitely a viable category at this point.

Tim exhales a long, pale plume of smoke and looks at her.

“I can’t stop taking the medication.”

“No,” Tim answers at last.

“So.” His insistent laconicism has begun to send her frustration to a boiling point. “What do I do, then?”

A flicker of - _something_ impacts Tim’s listless expression for an instant before it rapidly dissipates. He breaks her stare to pull a phone out of his pocket and look at it.

“I’m gonna be late.” There’s a faint underscore of apology in the words, though Jessica is too frustrated at his inability to explain _anything_ to care. “I’ll call.”

There are any _number_ of things Jessica could snap back in response. He’s been completely and deliberately unreceptive; the conversation has yielded no explanations. Whether she’s gone for the angle of subtlety or addressed the issues directly has made no difference. The meeting has still ended up being frustratedly one-sided and circular.

As far as she’s concerned, her anger is more than justified. Tim maintains exclusive control over what information is dispensed to her and what isn’t, including at what periods of time he chooses to hand over said information. She has half a mind to corner him here and now, to demand full, clear, and _detailed_ explanations to _everything that has gone wrong in her life_ since her brain woke up empty.

For a moment, she seriously considers it.

“Great,” she says. To his credit, Tim doesn’t flinch at the truly breathtaking amount of grinding exasperation Jessica infuses into the word. He only gives her an odd, jerking, partial shrug before he shuffles past her and into the parking lot.

Jessica watches him leave and wonders if she’s letting her last chance at knowing the truth slip unresistingly away.

After all, there’s no evidence to suggest that Tim is the sort of person to keep his word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a trigger warning for anxiety and flashbacks.


	4. Source

_The grip of sinuous steel is unfamiliar in her hand and her entire body is quaking so hard that she can’t hold its aim still. She can’t fire, she_ can’t, _oh_ god _she can’t -_

 _And he crouches there, hand outstretched, despair and pain and acceptance - that’s the worst thing, the_ acceptance, _the_ relief, _the_ desperation _for whatever nebulous torment he’s undergone to ultimately be_ over _\- all etched on ragged, sallow features._

_She’s saved the deliberation over pulling the trigger when footsteps rush them both. She half-turns but the echoes make their origin difficult to pinpoint, and before she can fully process it a darkly familiar hooded figure is racing at them -_

_\- and it tears right past her and lunges at her ex-assailant, gloved fingers arcing for his throat. It tears at him, bestial, murderous._

_She doesn’t wait to see who wins. The weapon is forgotten as she bolts._

Tim doesn’t call her later that day. He doesn’t even call her that evening. He calls the next morning while she is still passed out in the backseat of her car (she curses the insufficient, insubstantial nature of minimum wage) and leaves the curtest message of all messages, informing her that he has a doctor’s appointment at eight and is willing to meet her after, provided she gets there in time.

He forgoes the basic human courtesy of giving her an address, leaving Jessica to search through the (admittedly small) town’s directory to locate it.

In short, he keeps his word.

In the _worst_ sort of way.

And come nine in the morning, Jessica is waiting for him outside the suspiciously unsuspicious doctor’s office building when he comes out. If Tim is surprised to find her there, it doesn’t show, though the man’s entire demeanor is so incredibly low-energy that Jessica has private doubts over whether “surprise” even registers on his emotional roster, assuming he has one. He acknowledges her with a slow nod (half of a nod, maybe - he drops his head and just sort of lets it hover at that downcast point while he shoves his hands in his pockets) and walks over to stand beside her.

Jessica waits.

Tim mumbles an indistinct greeting and lights up a cigarette and still doesn’t meet her eyes.

She tries to suppress a bitter, humorless snort and mostly fails.

Tim blinks at her. “What?”

“Well, it’s just.” She jerks her head toward the building Tim’s just emerged from, lifting her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Doctor’s office. You know?”

It takes him a minute. Then he takes a steady pull from his manufactured nicotine, removes it from his mouth, and studies the cigarette thoughtfully. After a minute he releases his breath in a lengthy hush of smoke.

Evidently, he has nothing to say about the played-out irony here. The disturbingly not-at-all-tense and not-at-all-hostile silence stretches to an uncomfortable and _pliable_ point where it maintains all its tenacity and yet refuses to snap.

Tim, it seems, is _patient._

Or he’s just reluctant to say anything, which is much more likely.

_Something is watching her._

_“Look, Jay.” She has had it to here with his “it’s-for-a-documentary” bullshit, because it’s painfully obvious that he is a terrible, terrible liar. “I know you’re lying.”_

_His mouth gapes, presumably grasping for some half-assed rebuttal, and she has to suppress yet another wave of irritation. Did he honestly not realize that his cover story was so transparent?_

_Something is watching her._

Jessica has no idea how to broach this topic of discussion, especially considering her failure to learn anything about her new and unwanted condition, but she gives it an honest shot anyway, even if the venturing-and-gaining-type scenario she originally envisioned has more or less played out as a venturing-and-venturing-and-venturing-and-still-nothing-type result.

Tim hisses out another languorous whoosh of addiction as he studies the cars passing on the street without interest. The hand that has two fingers twined around the cigarette drops to dangle lazily at his side, too exhausted even to remain in conflict with gravity.

Regardless, Jessica tries.

“Who’s Jay?” she asks, slanting her head with narrowed eyes.

“An idiot,” Tim grunts. He exhales again, long and slow, before lifting the almost-butt of his cigarette, pinning it with a look of disgust, and throwing it to the ground. He grinds it with his heel with a viciousness that is bizarrely uncharacteristic to the tired emptiness he exudes on a daily basis.

“Trying to quit,” he explains in response to Jessica’s quizzical glance.

She can offer nothing but a soft shrug so she looks away again, turns to examine the red-and-white exterior of the building behind them. There’s nothing about the rust-colored brick patterns that would indicate it could be a doctor’s office. In Jessica’s experience, doctor’s offices are all the same: starkly lit, disconcerting in their too-clean, too-blank whiteness, all sharp edges and exposed corners. This building looks friendlier.

On the outside, at least.

_Something is watching her._

_Something is watching her._

_Something is watching her._

_“You’re not acting like a normal person.”_

_He looks sheepish at that. Sheepish, and just a little bit terrified._

Tim is shuffling with one foot, toeing at the remainder of his discarded cigarette. Jessica does not need to see the bruise-purple rings hanging beneath each eye or the run of dark growth on the lower half of his face to know that he is tired. Achingly, brutally, and ever-onwards tired. It shows in the tilt of his shoulders and the stillness of his hands and protective hunch of his back that curves his body into a weary concave arch. It shows in the slowness of his voice because even before when he’s pounced on her words with fiery rancor, the glaze of fatigue still dulls his speech.

It extends beyond _physical_ weariness, Jessica hypothesizes. There is something in Tim’s very soul that has become so worn and broken that it cannot function any longer, and that disconnect has long since leached into the inner workings of Tim’s thought and body and mind.

She wonders if this will happen to her.

She wonders if it already has.

“There’s a name,” Jessica says after an unacceptably long and listless silence has passed. “Amy. I think it’s important.”

Tim digests this information with a fractional nod and continues to watch the pavement.

“Does that sound familiar?” she prompts.

Tim shakes his head sharply before bowing it to reach up with one hand and swipe the overlong bangs from his face. Jessica shifts her weight, barely, away from him, unsure of whether this gesture is meant to indicate that, no, that name does not sound familiar, or that his hair was simply in the way.

She is kept in suspense for all of thirty seconds.

“No,” he says, seemingly undisturbed by the pregnant pause. “No, it doesn’t sound familiar.”

She watches his eyes flick from the door of the doctor’s office and then back to the pavement. She watches his hands slip into his pockets and brush at the box of cigarettes that are no doubt stored there. She watches a muscle in his cheek twitch once, twice. She watches his otherwise impassive face observe the sidewalk lifelessly.

Tim is lying.

People, Jessica decides as she watches Tim exist in the fragile, self-aware bubble of emptiness and solitude of his own making, do not get broken. She would say that they just get worn away, all the corners and angles and edges, until gradually what’s left of them fades.

Tim reached his expiration date long before she called him in a fit of desperation. It’s not that he fought past the proverbial end and is now wrestling with some corrosive, existential grief - it’s that he’s already _reached_ the point where his fate should have been addressed and, for some untold reason, the universe passed him by. Instead it allowed him to linger in a frustrated, halfway, _broken_ state of impossibility, alive and semi-functioning and failing to work past whatever previous trauma he undoubtedly experienced.

Except that he died anyway.

It’s just that he kept breathing afterward.

That’s Jessica’s working theory and so far it’s holding far too much water for her to be entirely comfortable with it.

Tim doesn’t feel... _real,_ almost. He doesn’t feel _actual._ It’s more or less like someone (the universe, probably, merciless in its ability to compensate) captured an echo of the man and crammed it into Tim’s shell and let it walk around wearing his facial expressions and smoking his life away and working his (no doubt) dead-end job and figured that would suffice.

Jessica wonders if the memory-wiping she apparently endured was a means of her getting off easy in this case.

The thought is sickening.

“Okay,” says Jessica, because she’s already spent too much time on _that_ particular vein of unpleasant thought, _thank_ you. “So you aren’t helping.”

Tim makes a halting gesture that suggests he was about to take another draw from the cigarette he no longer has. He re-establishes his composure remarkably swiftly, though Jessica definitely picks up on the agitation embedded in the movement.

“I’ve told you.” Tim no longer knows what he should do with his hands. They go into his pockets and then out of his pockets and then crossed over his chest and then dropping to his sides and then reaching up to scratch the back of his head and then back in the pockets and then fiddling with his lighter. “I can’t."

“I see this going two ways.” She holds up one finger. “One, you tell me everything. _Everything._ Or two,” she continues, overriding the swirl of discontent already brewing behind dead eyes. “You help me forget.”

Tim stills. There’s something dark and unreadable in his expression, and perhaps more than a little pained.

“You want to?” he asks quietly.

“Ordinarily, I’d say no,” she replies, drawing out the words. “But you’ve made it pretty clear that that’s in, uh, my best interest.”

“It is.” He meets her gaze steadily for the first time all day. “Trust me.”

“Okay, so you’re making _that_ pretty difficult.” She raises one eyebrow. “Considering how you’ve told me exactly _nothing.”_

“There’s a reason for that, too.”

“Right, well, you see my problem?”

Like so many of her other questions, Tim has no answer to that. His fingers click the lighter on and off with nervous rapidity, betraying his brewing anxiety.

“I can help you forget,” he says softly.

“Okay.” She faces him squarely, more or less forcing him to meet her eyes again. _“How?”_

“Not here,” he hisses. “And - and not now. Later.”

“You’ll call me?” she guesses wryly.

“Yeah.” Tim either doesn’t catch wind of her sardonicism or doesn’t care.

_“Hey, Jessica, it’s Alex. Uh, I just wanted to call and let you know I got in touch with Amy, so just disregard my last message. Thanks."_

She doesn’t get the chance to ask any more questions before he’s slipped from her life again and folded himself into a car and soon he is gone.

_“Hey, Jessica, it’s Alex. Uh, I just wanted to call and let you know I got in touch with Amy - ”_

Her hand automatically jumps to her phone, buried in one pocket, the sole lifeline to her annoyingly evasive contact.

_“Hey, Jessica, it’s Alex. Uh, I just wanted to call and let you know - ”_

Tim is her conduit, the only reminder to who she _was_ as opposed to who she _is,_ the suspicious and the paranoia-ridden and the untrusting who cannot, _must_ not be who Jessica was before an unforeseen neurological event halted her personality in its tracks.

_“Hey, Jessica, it’s Alex. Uh, I just wanted to call - ”_

She is trying to think and not think.

_“Hey, Jessica, it’s Alex - ”_

She is trying not to _focus._

_“- it’s Alex - ”_

She is trying not to _remember._

_“ - it’s Alex - ”_

_It’s Alex._

It’s _Alex._

Tim is her only link to who she was.

She wonders if this means she must amputate him from her life in order to forget.

In order to forget.

In order to _forget._

_It’s Alex._

In order to _forget._

_It’s Alex._

_His clumsy, fumbling apology was meant to preclude her about-face but she turns anyway and finds a piece trained unerringly at her head._

_He is sorry. He is_ sorry.

_He is also about to shoot her._

_It’s Alex._

In order to. _forget._

Pieces of her life that _did not happen_ are leaking through.

In order to forget.

_It’s Alex._

In order to forget.

_Amy -_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter may be unsettling for some readers, so there's a big warning for extreme paranoia, panic attacks, and anxiety as well as a small one for firearms.


	5. Dissociative

Tim feels that his life could best be summed up as a series of loud and increasingly ineffective _“no!”_ s.

He has tried taking the path of least resistance. He has _tried._ He has _tried,_ repeatedly, and with no success. Because, as he's learned so directly, “least resistance” does not actually translate to “no resistance,” and no amount of protests will stop that _resistance_ from bulldozing straight over his life and crushing it into one of its own design.

Currently, that design is driving to another day at another job that it doesn’t care about.

Tim lacks the energy to care about most things now.

Which, granted, isn’t wholly unwarranted.

Tim has been dead inside since he was forced to drive a tiny, blunt knife into his ex-sort-of-friend’s jugular for the sake of self-defense and to avenge an idiot with a camera whose general thought process was that it was, in fact, a _good_ idea to go running straight at a lunatic with a gun while he himself was armed with nothing but cutting sentiment and aggressive self-righteousness.

Tim finds it incredibly unpoetic and unfair that _he_ is the one who lived.

It’s not as if no one has ever pointed out his faults, because they are varied and manifold and he is acutely aware of each one. Out of all of those involved, he’s probably the _least_ deserving of escaping his own convoluted past with its inconceivable nightmares and shadows, except maybe Alex.

And even then, what Alex said - what he _did_ \- was not and never had been _his_ fault.

If it _were_ anyone’s fault, it would be Tim’s.

Tim, the compulsive liar.

Tim, the (in Alex’s words) sometimes-a-masked-psychopath.

Tim, who has taken a good long look at his life and genuinely finds nothing worth fighting for.

Tim, the only one whose loss would _not_ send ripples of grief into the lives of those around him.

Tim, the one with parents who did not and still do not give a damn, what between a mother who’d stopped bothering to visit him in the hospital since he turned eight and a father who’d never even entered the picture.

And, true to the cruel and bizarre and utterly warped sense of humor the universe must possess, _Tim_ is the one who was picked to _live._

And as much as he ponders, wonders, _agonizes_ over it, he cannot figure out why it was _him_ who made it through, and not _Jay._ Not the sole person wrapped up in this mess who was _not_ a completely selfish, self-serving bastard. Not the one who had been truthfully, honestly _willing_ to confront the problem, even if he’d done so with all the scintillating subtlety of a doctor treating frontotemporal dementia through application of blunt force trauma. Not the one who had rushed blindly into problem after problem with only a broken camera and misplaced trust to defend him. Not the one who had _cared,_ fiercely and far too much and with little-to-no regard for his own life, about other people’s long-past problems.

Not the one who had genuinely wanted to _fix_ this instead of leaving it all buried.

Not the one who had actually started out blameless, whose one great sin was initially nothing more than simple curiosity.

No, naturally that person had been gutted with a bullet to his liver and left to bleed out slowly and probably in a great deal of pain while the inhuman, impossible _thing_ that represented the sum of all his failures watched.

It had probably enjoyed it. Assuming _enjoyment_ and _emotional output_ even _apply_ to the thing in the first place.

Tim has had, at last, the opportunity to think long and hard about Jay’s fate and the only uniform conclusion he can come to is that he still thinks it’s bullshit.

True, from a more compartmentalized (heartless) perspective, it makes sense because, frankly, Tim _still_ finds it miraculous that Jay lived as long as he did. With _those_ breaking-and-entering tactics, rarely equipping himself with anything more than an outdated camera, Tim has _no idea_ how Jay even made his scant handful of breakthroughs.

 _(Jay_ who had, with all his typical skill and grace, unearthed every sword in everyone else’s lives and gathered them into a single place so he could throw himself on all of them, trusting that this would be enough to slake his burning curiosity.)

Jessica had asked who Jay was.

 _“An idiot,”_ Tim had said, and he’d meant it.

That gruff answer is about as close to the truth as he’s willing to get, at least as far as Jessica is concerned.

Just her _being_ here has already kicked up more unnerving nostalgia than he’s comfortable sitting with in one space. He has no desire to dust the ashes off those memories. This is meant to be _over._ It’s meant to be _done._

But he can’t exactly tell Jessica too bad, too late, shuffle off and move on, because if there’s anything he learned from Jay, it’s that this is the _least effective way possible_ to get someone to stop prying where they’re not wanted. And if Jessica is anything at all like Jay, any attempt to do so will result in something along the lines of a freshly broken-into apartment, half a dozen of his medical files leaked onto the Internet, and, worst of all, a rehash of the living hell his life promptly turned into afterward.

And as much fun as it was the last time around, Tim is really not in the mood to sign himself up for Cryptic Videos and Angry Guys With Guns: The Sequel.

He doesn’t think it’s possible to drag anyone else into this - everyone he ever knew is dead or worse - but he doesn't want to find out.

Tim gets back late - misunderstandings over who covers whose shift invariably results in Tim volunteering to do whatever overtime needs doing, because he’s in no great hurry to return to the tiny apartment that doesn’t feel like home.

“Home” would imply that it’s something more than simply a place to (fitfully) sleep and (forget to) eat on occasion.

“Tomb” would be the more semantically accurate phrase.

The events of the morning don’t feel any less distant than they did when Tim initially got to work; sleep won’t be forthcoming tonight.

Tim showers, changes, and pours fresh coffee in the maker in movements that are both mechanical and weary. He watches the brew heat and he does not look at the unmarked white mug and he does not think of the glare of white porcelain that reminds him wrenchingly, viscerally, of the pristine blankness of an ovular object and the taunting curves of its faint, ebony smile.

God, not even things as innocent as blank sheets as paper have the same meaning to him anymore. There’s something profoundly unsettling about seeing faces (not faces - empty, skeletal ovals that can emote far too much malice for objects so featureless) in every otherwise unassuming pale or white everyday object.

Tim doesn’t think of dark brown stains of blood as he pours the coffee and sips at it and finds it to be assuredly terrible in addition to far too hot.

The brown rings on the table he does not care about do not remind him of camera lenses, circular and black and glistening with the promise of capturing impossibilities on film.

Tim shuts his eyes and forces himself to sip again at the dark and truly, earnestly awful coffee (though “acid” might be the more appropriate term) and tries to think of nothing.

He immediately decides that thinking of nothing is a terrible idea.

He’s always hated the concept of nothing.

Even as a child, it terrified him.

So he stands and forgets about thinking about nothing and he paces and he does not think of the phantom tingle in the leg that was once smashed, crushed, shattered by a man who was not in control of his own free will and could not be held accountable for the sadistic reality of his actions.

He quickly sits down again.

There is nothing to distract Tim from any of it. Lately he’s had the benefit of distance from the past _every year of his life, the last four or so in particular._ He’s had the sanctuary of simpler, more forgettable nightmares and the exhaustive nature of his thoughtless job, but now the little shards of himself he’s tried in vain to bury have, with the re-emergence of a familiar figure in his life, been pulled from their catacombs, spread out in front of him with unnerving clarity.

Tim doesn’t think about it.

He doesn’t think about any of it.

He doesn’t think about broken-and-burned buildings or equally burned-out husks for people who died for the sake of friends who had long since lost their senses of selves and were no longer in control of any of their own horrible, destructive actions.

Nor does he think of the needling presence of a secondary consciousness that lies nested in his brain, kept dormant by tiny white capsules and their blend of chemical ingenuity that keeps that blinding, animal urge muzzled and sedated in its cage,

He doesn’t think of the dead faces seared into his brain.

Dead faces of friends.

Except, _really,_ not really. _Were_ he and Jay ever friends, even? Tim doesn’t think he has a word for whatever their relationship had been - two weirdly displaced people perpetually at-odds, constantly sniping at one another, more or less thrown together out of abnormal circumstance than anything else. There’s no way to articulate what they’d been to one another, in no small part because Tim is entirely unsure if he was ever a significant “anything” to Jay besides a convenient potential fountain of ambiguous, uncomfortable, oft second-guessed answers. Certainly, by the end, their strained and uncertain association had gone off the rocks, if mainly by virtue of an impromptu personality-brainwashing courtesy of Tim’s preternaturally elongated childhood nightmare. Yet even before that, there’d been too impenetrable a wall of (admittedly well-placed) mistrust, fear, frustration, for anything deeper than a wavering, hesitant, on-again-off-again alliance to be achieved.

To say nothing of the fluctuating power imbalances.

Tim doesn’t miss that.

And he doesn’t sympathize with Jessica’s hungry quest for answers because she doesn’t remind him of anyone who may or may not have had similar motives when he barged clumsily into Tim’s life, camera in fumbling hand, with markedly less finesse than Tim’s (hopefully by now nonexistent) masked alter-ego.

He doesn’t wince at her obviously sharp instincts of self-preservation, those which his last acquaintance had lacked so fundamentally that he was more or less the sort of person who would set himself on fire in hopes of keeping a distant, uncaring, ungrateful friend warm.

He refuses to say that he _understands_ her palpable frustration, _god_ he understands it, because she isn’t the only one who’s been tormented by questions of who or what she is and what did she do and oh god what if she did something _awful?_

He recognizes well enough the jarring nature of displaced memory; how fractured recollection tears across the human brain in the ruthless skid of irregular electrical discharge on frayed neurons. He has long since become accustomed to the unforgiving headaches with their biting, bone-deep pain. Even after memory is restored and his synapses are no longer engaged in ceasefire, the aftertaste of the fabricated emptiness remains in a brutal, weblike skein of confusion, denial, and ever-growing pain. He is all too familiar with the dull, persistent ache that settles behind every blink and adjustment in jaw pressure.

Seeing Jessica again, after all this, is...upsetting, to say in the least. The issue of her presumed flashbacks just makes things worse.

He should have _known._ He should have at least _suspected_ that the breakaway couldn’t be that simple. It had come at such a heavy price (the gradual, painful deaths of everyone Tim had ever known, for one, his metaphorical self included) that to assume it could all be over had been such a tempting trap of thought.

And Tim, who apparently does not learn from his mistakes, had led himself right into it.

He should have realized. He should have taken precautions. There had been no indication that things could just be _over_ \- the situations have never been clear-cut, the solutions have never been straightforward, the decisions could never be boiled down to uncomplicated live-or-die false dichotomies.

He hadn’t broken his life away from everything with any great plan in mind _(Step One: Become a solitary, distant, uncaring bastard. There is no step two)._ And even months after the whole ordeal is (finally, finally, _finally)_ behind him, it seems that this deliberate detachment from everything Tim once was isn’t enough to keep those demons out.

Tim’s had enough of demons, literal and otherwise. He’s had enough of demons to last him a _lifetime._

There’s no way of knowing how much Jessica remembers, how much she _might_ or _will_ remember. There’s no way of telling if her brain was wiped completely clean, a lá Jay prior to his digging up of old tapes due to a stupid, _stupid_ humanitarian impulse, or if there are still latent memories there, lurking and ready to be potentially unlocked given the right trigger. Tim has no idea if there’s any sort of amnesiac consistency. His own case was (is) a rather unique one.

Hell, they _all_ were.

No. No. No. No. No.

Tim spent his whole life focusing on getting _past_ the horrors that have always clouded him, never once stopping to think about what he might do once he succeeded.

Now Tim spends his days and nights and everywhere in between refusing to think of anything. It’s the safest course of action. He’s taught himself not to ask questions, not to look too deep into anything, to maintain a careful arm’s-length barrier of constructed apathy. It’s safer. It’s safer.

It’s _safer._

It’s the _right thing to do._

Immediately after he thinks it, Tim decides it’s also bullshit. He has no right to take the moral high ground in this or any situation. The same warning, the same word - _liar, liar, liar_ \- has followed him for a disproportionately large percentage of his life, even before he was being called out on his half-truths in the form of bizarre, static-laced YouTube videos.

_Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar._

Tim has never refuted those claims directly. Not even during any of the times when Jay had asked him, voice sharp and heavy with suspicion, if Tim was hiding anything from him because he knew how they had to work together and that means no more secrets, Tim, please, that’s the only way we’re going to get through this. Every time, Tim shook his head mutely before later resorting to careful, misleading avoidance - No. No, don’t be ridiculous, Jay. You’ve seen the videos. You’ve seen the person in the hoodie, how much he hates me. He just doesn’t want us working together.

And any tender, fragile hopes for retaining some remnants of ethical purity had been dashed when Tim had willingly colored his conscience a little darker just so he could _end this,_ and plunged a flip knife into an old friend’s throat so he could watch him bleed out slow and shudder and gasp and receive some warped, insubstantial form of _closure._

He _could_ have made sure. He could have. He _could_ have guaranteed that this could all be well and truly over, and no one would suffer this fate or this life ever again.

_“If there’s someone left…”_

No.

_“If there’s someone left, you have to kill them.”_

No. No, Tim is selfish and wants to get that overdue chance to _live_ after years and years and years and _years_ of running and self-blaming and lying and hiding and he’s not going to gut himself over a man who years ago lost his mind to an impossible, emaciated _thing_ that whispered its terrible demands into his soul.

_“If there’s someone left, you have to kill them. And then yourself.”_

And apparently Jay’s pathos-ridden, nearsighted altruism is infectious because as much as Tim had _wanted_ to and _could_ have and had been _fully capable of doing so,_ he _could not bring himself_ to deal with Jessica the same way.

So she had lived, and now Tim has to answer for it.

Of _course_ he does.

As he does to every error he’s ever made. Ever.

Tim puts his head in his hands and doesn’t think of how he could have done it. He doesn’t consider how he could do it now and still get away with it, probably. Because as much distance as he’s tried to put between them, that apparently was _not enough._ Jessica has re-entered the dead and dying playing field, for all his efforts to dissuade her from this course of action, and his tenuous grasp on normalcy has already begun to flutter and fade as a result.

Although the notion that he ever _had_ a grasp on normalcy as a concept, as a principle, as a part of his cohesive vocabulary, is nothing short of laughable.

He’d done his best to allow Jessica that, at the very least.

He’d done his best.

He _had._

The knife is gone now, and the gun and the camera and the bags upon bags of tapes. The bloodstained clothes are gone, thrown out, the tiny ruptured reminders of the existence of a man called Jay all but extinct.

He could do the same to Jessica. He would hate himself for doing it - hell, he hates himself for even _thinking_ it and considering it a viable course of action - but he has to put the option on the table. It might be the only way.

He could do that. He could do that if it meant he could keep going. Living, surviving, existing - whatever one calls what it is he’s currently doing.

But if Jay died for _anything,_ if Tim could ascribe that senseless death to _any_ purpose, it would be for her.

Jay hadn’t known Jessica. He’d exchanged words with her all of twice. And yet she’d become his justification for everything, for every miserable night spent in ratty motels and every awful nightmare and every fallen friend.

 _We have to save Jessica,_ Jay would whisper, full of that sick, grim determination. Even if every other part of him was hollow with hopelessness, _we have to save Jessica._

_We have to save Jessica, Tim._

And if Tim wants Jay’s death to mean anything, anything at all, he’s going to need to let her go. She has to have the _chance._ Jay would have wanted it.

(Oh, sure, _now_ he cares about what Jay wants. As soon as the man is _dead.)_

Tim lets out a tiny breath of relief at his conclusion. He won’t make that choice. Jessica will live. He doesn’t have to do anything to Jessica.

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t solve the problem.

Though there are alternate solutions.

For example - conversely, he could ignore the former part of Alex’s parting advice in favor of the latter.

_And then yourself._

Tim won’t pretend he hasn’t entertained that choice before. He has the latticework of thin white lines ribbing his arms to prove he’s at least considered it. He could die and all the summarized pain and suffering of the most recent eight or so years would die with him.

It scares him that he knows he could do it. But he’s always been capable. Maybe the man of five years ago couldn’t do the same to Jessica, but he’s always had that _part_ of himself, that which could take a razor or a gun or too many pills and end it all.

He could do it.

He could.

And yet.

It would be the quickest, easiest solution for _himself,_ again, and there would be no guarantee it would do anything for Jessica. And then he wouldn’t be around to help her if this turned out to be the case.

Tim won't examine the decision there, whether the choice is based in the _selfish_ or the _selfless._

So.

The Alex Kralie Method is out.

Which leaves...what, exactly?

Tim pinches the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger and thinks about his bitter, terrible coffee. Jessica can’t stop taking the pills and she can’t increase the dosage because that might jog yet _more_ memories and she can’t hold out and hope they go away eventually because if they _don’t_ she’ll start remembering more and more and _more_ and that would -

That would be bad.

That would be the Continued Adventures of People With Cameras, featuring Jessica as the desperate would-be investigator in lieu of the deceased Jay.

Tim drains the mug and ignores the way the dregs gather at the bottom in congealed lumps because they look a little too much like sticky handprints of clotted blood left on abandoned school floors.

He doesn’t know what to do.

He just knows he doesn’t want to drag Jessica into this mess.

Again.

Jay wouldn’t have wanted it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains potentially triggering content involving contemplation of suicide, mention of self-harm, and multiple mentions of (canon) character deaths.


	6. Transient

_Something is watching her._

_An unchecked glance over one shoulder only confirms that she still can’t see it, but she can feel the presence of a wrongness behind her, lurking somewhere between periphery and nonexistence._

_She turns back to face the camera and the words are spilling out faster now, her self-righteous tirade now transitioning into verbal confirmation that she is falling apart._

_Something is watching her._

_“I’m losing huge chunks of time,” she babbles, and she doesn’t know whether she should be more disturbed by the fact that a camera is still pointed at her face or that its owner has stopped looking confused and begun to look more pointedly wary. “Having pounding headaches and coughing fits, and…”_

_Something is watching her._

_And she trails off, hand jerking in an erratic gesture to illustrate some further nebulous, unquantifiable distress._

_She tries to keep going, does her best to explain, but it all comes out in a tangle of words about dreams and being watched and -_

_\- and something is watching her._

There is a great injustice in this world and that injustice is that Jessica has yet to find one of those little cliché independent coffee shops that actually serves coffee that is _not_ indisputably terrible. It makes no difference which corner she stops on and which café with its arrangement of adorable tiny chair-and-table settings she enters - a fine selection of local-brewed teas they may have, but thus far every single “coffee, black, no room for cream” order she’s placed has amounted to nothing more than an eco-friendly styrofoam cup of piping-hot mediocrity.

The small, semi-remote town Tim has moved to since he last met with her, it seems, is no exception in this regard. Granted, this is the first coffee shop of the doubtless many she could potentially encounter down the road, dictated by Tim as their next meeting place, but Jessica doesn’t hold out much hope.

She appreciates the change in scenery all the same. With the meeting place set in a reasonably casual, public atmosphere, there’s a much lower chance of Tim being able to bolt mid-conversation.

Also it is Saturday.

Which leaves Tim with no _excuse_ to bolt mid-conversation, as he does not _work_ on Saturday.

This is promising.

Jessica is _still_ waiting for her coffee, black, no room for cream (what, are they importing it from _Jamaica?)_ when Tim enters, haggard as ever, and makes a straggling line for her table. He slouches into the seat across from her, the hand that creeps up to support his head (which is now listing dangerously sideways) doing very little to conceal the beard that has rapidly begun to develop.

“You okay?” Jessica asks with no small amount of wry concern.

“Mm,” is Tim’s only answer, complete with a barely perceptible bob of the head.

Jessica leans forward.

“Tim?”

 _“Mm,”_ Tim grunts a little more emphatically and seems to wake up a little. “Coffee.”

“Yeah,” says Jessica, eyebrows drawing down to form a hard frown.

A moment passes.

Then Tim stands again - a little shakily, she notes - and manages to get over to the order counter without toppling over. Jessica considers this an impressive feat, since the man looked just about half-dead upon entrance.

Scratch that. He’d looked _all_ dead.

The cashier translates his mumbled order and Tim navigates an unduly slow path back to the table.

“Rough night?” she asks as soon as he sits again.

“Mm. Yeah.”

He doesn’t explain. Instead he fumbles around in one pocket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter before abruptly seeming to remember that they’re seated in a public restaurant. The cigarettes disappear but the lighter stays out; he clicks it on and off with unnerving repetition, apparently needing something to do with his hands.

Jessica doesn’t blame him.

“So,” she begins, eyebrows raised again.

Tim meets her gaze with eyes looking like they’re approaching half-mast.

“So.” But he answers with a steadiness that belies every signal his shifting hands, nervous squint, and slumped posture are broadcasting on all channels.

“I remembered something else.” She’d settled on one-hundred-percent honesty long before making the drive here. So far she’s encountered no proof that Tim has in any way appreciated this, and his anxious adjustment in sitting position confirms that he’s still, for whatever reason, uncomfortable with that decision.

“Oh yeah?” He keeps his tone light. It can’t possibly be for her benefit, so she assumes it has something to do with his own coping mechanisms.

“Yeah.” Jessica picks up one of the cheap commercial sugar packets and toys with it, mirroring Tim’s restlessness. “Another name. Alex.”

Tim says nothing but the pace of his fidgeting increases. Unlike “Amy,” which had generated nothing more than a clipped lie, “Alex” warrants a fair degree of agitation.

She waits for him to explain or, less optimistically, divert the flow of conversation, but he does neither.

“You told me you could help.” Immediately after she says it, she winces. No matter her intent, the words had come out as accusatory, and Tim’s gaze snaps back to her at once.

“Yeah.”

The silence stretches, thin and unrelenting.

“Okay,” Jessica says, unable to fully contain her mounting frustration. “So _how?”_

Tim opens his mouth, closes it, furrows his brow. He takes another steadying breath, seemingly ready to launch into another explanation, and his hands still for a moment. Then -

“You have to _try_ to forget.”

Jessica waits expectantly for a further explanation, but as the minutes drag by it becomes increasingly more evident that that’s all Tim is going to say.

“Seriously?” she demands at last, scowl deepening. “That’s it?”

“That’s - ” Tim’s hands stop occupying them with toying the lighter long enough for him to wave one in a vague, vertical circular gesture. “That’s the...gist of it.”

“Uh.” Jessica laughs once, an utterly mirthless huff of air. _“No.”_

Tim looks at her quizzically.

“You don’t get to put this on me. You think I’m not _trying_ hard enough to ignore all this?”

“That’s not, uh.” Tim transfers his confused frown to the ceiling. “That’s not _exactly_ what I - ”

“Because I _am,”_ she continues, doing her best to keep her voice from escalating in volume any further. “I’m _trying._ But ignoring this problem hasn’t made it go away. Like, at _all.”_

A high, shredding noise, and Jessica looks down to realize she’s torn open the sugar packet, scattering tiny white granules all over the table. She blinks.

“Oops.”

She clears them off with a swipe of her hand and does her best not to look mortified. Thankfully, she’s saved the trouble when the barista calls her order and she can weave off between tables and return with typical eco-friendly styrofoam cup in hand.

The coffee goes squarely in the center of the table, hands wrapped loosely around it.

A protective barrier.

Tim has curled a little more around himself, rolling his lighter between forefinger and thumb.

Jessica blows on the coffee and takes a tentative sip.

She finds it thoroughly mediocre.

“I didn’t mean to say you aren’t,” Tim says at last, and now he has his eyebrows knitted at the table as if there’s some aspect of the delicate wire surface he disagrees with on a deep and personal level. “Trying, I mean.”

She leans forward.

“So _help,”_ she says mildly.

Tim’s eyes flick up to meet hers and dart down again.

“I don’t know how,” he admits finally.

She sits back. She sighs. She looks at the ceiling. She looks back at Tim. She takes another sip from her dreadful coffee without knowing why, though it’s entirely possible she’s picked up on Tim’s physical tics of being unable to sit still.

“You were right,” Tim continues. Jessica squints at the non sequitur.

“What?”

“About Jay.” His gaze remains carefully trained on the table. “You were right. He’s dead.”

This is unsurprising, though the frankness with which Tim delivers the news sends a small chill through her. Her grip tightens on the coffee cup, an impromptu security anchor. It’s warm, if nothing else.

“Oh,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say to that.

“He did want - ” Tim breaks off with a shaky hand gesture, a flutter of movement containing nothing but knotted anxiety. “Um. It’s what he wanted. To keep you safe. So I tried. Uh. I tried to do that."

Jessica arches an eyebrow.

“Great job,” she says neutrally.

“No, you don’t - ” And he stops again, growing ever more frustrated, though it’s with himself or with her is unclear. “You and me, we’re the last. Everyone else is - ”

And he shuts his eyes and swallows and looks upward in a wretched, hollow motion that summarily contains more emotion than Jessica’s ever seen him use in the past handful of days she’s met with him. When he speaks again, the words are alight with a stark, agonizing edge.

“There were others, once. And they’re all dead.”

He swallows again, stiffly.

Jessica tries to digest this but the man who’s spent the past few days in a perpetual cage of forced indifference is now dissolving in a despair-ridden wreck and she _doesn’t know what to do about it._

“What happened?” she asks quietly once a sufficiently loaded silence has passed.

Tim shuts his eyes again and shakes his head.

“You don’t want to know.”

Jessica nods.

“Okay.”

She has no doubt that he’s right about that.

At some point there were others, some unknown amount of others, and of them all, there is only Tim.

She doesn’t know what could (would) be capable of that, and Tim is right in that she does not really _want_ to.

The coffee is a lifeline to offset the coldness of this declaration, and she sips at it again despite its current status as an affront to all things coffee-related. The stuff burns her tongue.

“So you need to forget.”

Tim’s voice is still painful to listen to, each word full of some wrenching, secondary meaning lost to her.

When she meets his stare, it’s the clearest she’s ever seen it. Tim looks back at her, expression pained and eyes blazing with vicious, unwavering desperation. There’s a horrible depth and unease to the unfamiliarly emotive gaze.

“You _need_ to,” Tim continues tautly. “You _need_ to forget. It’s the only way.”

His eyes slip at the last two words, flicker down and then up again.

He’s lying.

Somehow, Jessica doesn’t think she wants to know the unspoken alternative.

_“Where are we going?” Jessica fumbles with keys, jamming them into the car door, and her heart is roaring in her throat. “What do we do now?”_

She closes her eyes.

The pressure of locked memory on her internal thought processing is _tremendous._

It is unbearable.

“I don’t know how,” she says thickly, trying to think past it, trying to _breathe_ past it. Trying not to remember, trying not to remember, trying not to remember, trying not to _remember because_

_Its face is an awful blank oval -_

\- because she has to _forget._

She has to _forget._

_The grip of sinuous steel is unfamiliar in her hand and her entire body is quaking -_

Oh god.

Oh _god._

Oh _fuck._

She can’t remember this.

She _can’t_ remember this.

She _can’t._

She can’t remember this.

_Its face is an awful blank oval that somehow still manages to radiate a curiousness, an intense maliciousness._

She is gripping her coffee and she is gripping her coffee and she is drinking her coffee and she is not thinking of the nightmares in her head.

She can’t remember this.

She has to forget.

She has to _forget._

_Its head tilts to one side with inhuman, oil-slick slowness._

Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.

_She can see the faintly puckered pinches on the otherwise empty, smooth surface and she thinks she screams._

It’s getting worse.

It’s getting _worse._

She has to stop.

She has to stop _remembering._

“Tim - ”

_Its tendrils are long and stretched and she cannot glean the dreadful incomprehension of its existence and it reaches for her fragile human mind and twists -_

Oh god.

_Oh god._

Breathe, breathe, breathe breathe breathe _breathe_

 _it comes shrieking across her consciousness and sluices into memorythoughtemotion with ruthless abandon she feels torquing systems of memory breaking down and it’s shredding into the core of herself and she feels the ridges of its curiosity only not curiosity because that emotion is so mangled by what it is because it is not human it cannot be human it cannot possibly be human it is too alien it is too wrong it is wrong it is wrong it is_ wrong _and it tears apart her neurons and corrupts their synaptic pulses there is static in her brain there is electric impulse buried in the organic it must be untangled it must be corrected it must be purified it must be it must be it must be it must be it must be it must be it must be it must be_

she is aware of sweat and cold and shaking but not -

_oh god oh god she knows what it’s doing it will annihilate thought it will turn her into something else she can feel it ripping away at the humanity beneath she can feel it converting brain into scar tissue she can feel it in an agonizing, ionizing shrill of unstable elements and her base properties will be assimilated and those hostile elements will be removed and she will not be compatible her atoms are not compatible the corrugated memories are misaligned it is displacing her brain it will kill her it will kill her it is killing her stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop_

she can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can’t _breathe she can’t breathe_

_the molecules are rejecting the treatment they cannot_

breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe

_something is watching her_

she can’t _breathe_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter may be unsettling for some readers so it comes with a huge warning for PTSD-like triggered flashbacks and panic attacks.


	7. Post-Traumatic

She breathes. 

She opens her eyes and has to close them again.

She breathes.

She opens her eyes in a cautious squint.

It takes a long time (longer than it should) to adjust to the brightness. Some part of her still subsumed in shadowed unknowability, no doubt. She lets the sun burn that away.

She opens her eyes.

“ - yeah, kinda like...I dunno, I thought it was an epileptic seizure at first but she was still talking, like she was responding to something hallucinatory. I don’t know how - what?”

A voice.

She focuses on the silhouetted form the voice belongs to and has to adjust to the subtle shifts in light. He stands, one hand holding a phone to his ear, the other fisted into the hair on the back of his head, an obvious testament to his rifted anxiety.

He. Him.

Wait.

She _knows_ him.

Everything else snaps together with reassuring clarity as Jessica regains possession of her faculties. Unfortunately, becoming fully cognizant is accompanied by a fresh, concentrated pain in the temples.

She is sitting on a bench. This is probably fortunate, as she feels dizzy just sitting there and standing would probably be a terrible idea at the present time.

She is sitting on a bench that looks to be a reasonable distance from the coffee shop she remembers Tim delineating as a meeting place.

Tim’s name resurfaces with jangling, nervous relief. She automatically scans her surroundings and locates him (again) almost immediately.

“ - well, no, she just wasn’t responding to me. Look, I know she has some medical...stuff but it shouldn’t have been...no, no, I know it hasn’t been like this before. What? No, I’m absolutely sure.”

“Tim.”

He jerks around to face her and raises one finger to his lips. If he’s surprised to see her back in the land of the nominally-functioning, he doesn’t show it.

“Well, okay, she’s awake _now._ Hm? Twenty-minute...yeah, it _might_ have been a panic attack but it could also be something - ”

“Tim,” she says again. 

“ - not as far as I know, no. Okay, yeah, you’d really have to ask - ”

_“Tim.”_

“Hang on.” He puts a hand over the speaker and frowns at her. “You okay?" 

“Yeah. Er - now I am.” She shakes herself. “Never mind. What’re you doing?” 

“I was, uh.” Tim looks sheepish. _Tim_ looks _sheepish._ “Calling an ambulance.” 

_“What?”_

“Okay, so you were shaking and saying stuff that didn’t make sense. At first I figured, y’know, epilepsy, but - ”

“So, uh.” Jessica narrows her eyes inquisitively. “Um. Ambulance.”

“Yeah?” he draws the word out, one eyebrow canting up at an alarming velocity.

“Please don’t.”

Tim looks at her, long and wary, then lifts the phone back to his ear.

“Mm? I’m still here. But. Yeah, um, looks like you were right. Panic, uh, thing. So, uh. Yeah, you can call that off.” Pause. “Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Bye.”

He hangs up and pockets the phone, then crouches in front of her.

“You okay?”

(She doesn’t know if she can get used to hearing an inflection of concern in his voice.)

She looks at him. He screws his eyes shut and drops his head, massaging his brow with one hand.

“Okay, yeah. Dumb question.”

He sighs heavily. The tension comes rippling away from him, leaving his more characteristic inertial silence.

Jessica recalls his words on _“others”_ and how they’d died and she wonders how many of them there were, who they were, and what might have happened to leave one insurmountably broken man to carry their names as burden.

She remembers the intruding presence in her mind, the way it tore mercilessly across the landscape of _her_ and sheared away all thought and scope and sanity until finally it pulled away and left her in the blissfulness of unconsciousness.

She knows now how it assaulted her, how its attack went beyond mental trauma and extended into an offense against _self,_ a paralyzing rearrangement of molecules and an introduction of foreign elements that cleaved through everything, everything, everything she was and rendered it all inert. 

It had done her a _service_ by hiding those memories. Or maybe she had tried to burn them out of existence of her own accord, urged by some subconscious psychological impulse to protect what remained of her sanity and sense of self.

Regardless, she can only recall fragments now.

That’s probably a blessing.

That’s probably why she’s still _breathing._

“I don’t think I was supposed to remember that,” she whispers.

“Remember what?” He looks back up at her with eyes that are glazed with the same tiredness, the same sort of fundamental exhaustion with the world at large, its uncertain machinations included.

“That - thing.” She makes a vague, waving motion. “It - did something. To me.”

Tim nods.

“Yeah.”

She shudders at the half-recalled sensation of the foreign matter meeting in junction with hers.

“Do you know what it was?”

Tim stands and walks away, cigarettes already halfway out of his pocket.

“Yeah.”

He lights a new one. Jessica stands and, after a few experimental steps with only insubstantial sensations of vertigo, joins him.

It takes him a minute to notice her standing there. After a second’s shuddering pause, he tilts the packet of cigarettes obligingly toward her.

She accepts the unspoken offer and draws one out, then allows him to spark the end with his silvered lighter.

Jessica has never been a smoker. Her first few pulls are clumsy and she tries to hold back the instantaneous desire to cough and splutter. She fails at this a number of times before she’s able to breathe out the smoke with the same cast of serenity Tim radiates. She emulates his stance, buries one hand in a pocket as she lets the nicotine work its way into her system.

Neither of them speak.

Tim exhales a low rush of smoke. Twenty seconds later, Jessica does the same.

Her cigarette - not her first, but the first in a very, very long time - is nearly burned to its end when she turns to Tim again. 

“What do we do?”

For a long time, Tim doesn’t have anything to say to that. She expects him to eventually drop something tacitly profound, maybe along the lines of “live” or “survive” or “exist” or something else equally in the realms of appropriately, obscurely nonsensical.

Instead he shrugs.

“I don’t know.”

She has no doubt that he’s actually being honest here, likely for the first time in years.

So she becomes frank.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

Tim fixates on some distant point on the horizon and shrugs again.

“Probably.”

Jessica considers this, shuts her eyes, and nods.

_“Where are we going?” Jessica fumbles with keys, jamming them into the car door, and her heart is roaring in her throat. “What do we do now?”_

_“Uh.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, his voice is a smear of ragged fear and weariness, the dark crescent moons hang printed beneath his eyes. “Go to your place. Pack something, pack lightly.”_

_The words spill out in a frantic jabber, and it doesn’t help that at every other word his vision breaks to scan the hostile, distant treeline, the infection of paranoia naked in each twitching movement._

_“We need to go somewhere that he’s not going to think to look for us,” he continues, and it’s horribly, starkly obvious that Jessica is just hearing an untidy, panicked thought process vocalized. “And we’ll figure out what to do from there. Okay?”_

Jessica opens her eyes.

“Fair enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter include smoking and anxiety/panic attacks.

**Author's Note:**

> "The Amnesiac's Bible" is a seven-chapter, Jessica-centric investigation into the series' aftermath and an outside perspective on its events. It deals with heavy topics such as PTSD, depression, and triggered flashbacks. 
> 
> Special thanks to Goose for generously volunteering to read through this and just generally being a fantastic beta.


End file.
